Not for His Opinions: What Aivo Peterson Was Actually Convicted Of

There is a sentence I keep meeting whenever his name comes up, and it always arrives with the same worn certainty. They didn't jail him for anything he did. They jailed him for what he thinks. Sometimes it comes better dressed. He was punished for the war. He was punished for wanting things better for Russians. He said out loud what half of Narva feels, and the state made an example of him. I hear it from people I like, and I understand the reflex underneath it, because if you grew up Russian-speaking here you learn early to watch who the state decides to single out.

I'm one of those people, more or less. I grew up in a Russian-speaking family in Estonia, and I don't reach for the word "treason" lightly or hand it to a prosecutor just because they've asked for it. So instead of arguing about the feeling, I went and read what the court actually put its name to. I'd suggest you do the same before you make up your mind, because the case file and the rumour are not telling the same story.

What he actually did

Begin with who he is, because the rumour needs him to be nothing more than a dissident. Aivo Peterson is an Estonian citizen, a former border guard from Narva, and a co-founder of Koos, "Together," the small pro-Russian party he built for the 2023 election. Being pro-Russian in your politics is not a crime in Estonia, and I want to be flat about that at the start. If his file held nothing but his speeches and his party programme, there would be no case, and I'd be writing about something else.

His file is not that. Between the autumn of 2022 and his arrest in March 2023, Peterson travelled through Russia into occupied eastern Ukraine and filmed himself there. The court found, as proven fact and not as suspicion, that these trips were organised and paid for by the Russian state, which runs them for foreigners willing to carry its message home. Before he left, he agreed with the organisers what the videos would say: posts to frighten viewers that the war was coming for them too, to push Western and Estonian audiences to stop helping Ukraine, to make people doubt NATO and doubt that Estonia could defend itself at all. He made them. He appeared on Russian propaganda programmes. In return he was promised his expenses covered, a daily allowance, and his safety while on Russian soil, and those promises were kept. The money that changed hands, a little over two thousand euros, the court treated as the proceeds of a crime.

This is the part the phrase "they jailed him for his opinions" needs you not to look at. It is not an opinion to take a brief and a per diem from the government then killing Ukrainians, and to deliver, on schedule, the video that government ordered. He took the job.

There was a second strand, and it matters even though it never made a headline. Through his co-defendant Dmitri Rootsi, the judges found, Moscow signalled that it was interested in working with a party willing to change Estonia's course, and a meeting was planned with politicians from a party in the Russian State Duma. The danger the court named was specific and cold: a party like that reaching the Estonian parliament would hand Russia a quiet lever inside our own politics. Rootsi was convicted too. So was a third defendant, the Russian citizen Andrei Andronov, of the foreigner's version of the same offence, since treason under Estonian law is something only a citizen can commit.

Let me hand you one thing before you can accuse me of smuggling it past you. The prosecution alleged something more lurid as well, a kind of "civil defence" unit that might have acted as an armed group in a crisis. The trial court did not find that Russia had directed that scheme, and on appeal it was recharacterised as preparation rather than treason. So put it aside. I am not resting a single word on it. Strip that piece out entirely and the treason conviction still stands, on the trips, the paid videos, and the party built as a channel.

The line the judges drew

Here is the passage that ought to end the "it was really his views" argument, because the court did not dodge it. Peterson's lawyer argued exactly what you hear on the street: that convicting him punished his freedom of speech. The judges met the argument head on and rejected it, and the way they rejected it is the whole point.

Estonia's constitution protects free expression, and the court said plainly that everything Peterson had said as a politician here, before he began cooperating with Russia, remained protected. His opinions, however much anyone dislikes them, were his to hold and to voice. The court went one step further and said it did not even matter whether his message shifted once he reached occupied Ukraine. What made it treason was not the content of the videos. It was that he produced them in cooperation with a hostile state, on its instructions and with its money.

Sit with that, because it is the reverse of a state silencing a critic. A court that wanted to punish his opinions would have reached straight for his opinions. This one fenced them off, said they were none of its business, and convicted him for what he did alongside a foreign intelligence operation instead. You can believe the sentence is too long. You will have a hard time reading that reasoning and calling it a man jailed for thinking the wrong thoughts.

The two stories I keep hearing

So take the two folk versions and hold them up against this.

"It's because of the war." In one sense, of course, and not the sense it's meant in. There is no treason trip to occupied Ukraine without the occupation, and Peterson was only useful to Moscow because Moscow was at war and wanted that war sold to the people back here. But "because of the war" is offered to mean he was swept up by a jittery state hunting for a Russian to punish. The papers show the opposite. He was not arrested for opposing the war, or for being from Narva, or for anything he believed. He was arrested coming home from paid work for the side that started it.

"He wanted things better for Russians." Perhaps he told himself that. Plenty of people who do real damage are sure they are helping. But wanting things better for Russian-speakers is ordinary politics, and you do it in the open: at the ballot box, in the council chamber, in the newspaper, in Estonian and Russian both. It does not require a Kremlin-funded film shoot in a city Russia is shelling its way through. The moment your advocacy runs on another state's instructions and another state's cash, you are not lifting the Russians of Estonia up. You are spending them. A frightened, resentful Russian minority is exactly what Moscow finds useful here, and a man paid to keep it frightened is not its defender.

Watch, too, how the martyr gets built. While Peterson sat in pre-trial detention, his party made him its sole candidate for the European Parliament in 2024, turning a treason prosecution into a campaign poster. People confident the file is empty don't run the defendant as their only candidate. They needed you looking at the poster, not the file.

The case isn't finished

I don't want to sell you a cleaner story than the one that exists, because you would be right not to buy it.

The case is not over. The county court gave him fourteen years in December 2025. The appeals court raised it to sixteen in April 2026. By that spring Peterson, his co-defendant, and the prosecutor had all taken it to the Supreme Court. As I write, the top court has not spoken, and until it does the sentence can still move. Treason is also one of the heaviest instruments a state owns, and a healthy country should feel a chill every time it is used, most of all against an awkward political outsider. I don't switch that chill off because I find the defendant unsympathetic. Keeping an eye on how the charge gets used is the civic reflex the rumour imagines it is exercising. It would be the right reflex, if the facts underneath were thinner.

They are not thin. And notice which way the caution actually cuts. This was not a rubber stamp. The court threw out the scariest thing the prosecutor alleged. It protected the defendant's speech, on the record, in the judgment itself. It set him bail, gave him a full trial across two years, an appeal that moved the sentence, and a road to the Supreme Court he is driving down right now. That is a slow, self-correcting machine grinding through its own doubts, not the fixed result people picture when they say it was settled in advance.

What I actually think

I'll say the thing I believe, without the padding around it.

I don't think Estonian courts put people away for a decade and a half because they hold the wrong passport or the wrong sympathies. It isn't that I imagine the system is flawless. It's that this particular verdict shows its work, and the work is careful in the very places a stitch-up would be careless. Someone who wanted Peterson gone for his politics would never have paused to defend his right to those politics inside the ruling that convicts him. They would only have wanted the result. This court wanted the line, and it drew it where the law draws it: between the man's opinions, which it left alone, and his cooperation with the country waging the war, which it did not.

If you have been told he is a martyr, I understand why it lands. The story flatters a real and reasonable fear, and it asks nothing of you except to feel it. The file asks more. It asks you to read what he took, from whom, and to do what. When I read it, the martyr did not survive the reading. I don't think he will survive yours.